Multimedia

Narratives

Site Information

Feature Articles - A Good Idea of Hell

A Good Idea of Hell:
Letters from a Chasseur à Pied is a new book from Texas A&M University
Press, #83 in its Military History series. It received the 2004
Distinguished Book Award for best memoir from the Society for Military
History.

Sponsored Links

Robert Pellissier, the
author of the letters, spent most of the war in the French army, stationed
in the Vosges Mountains in Alsace overlooking the Rhine.

He was born in France and
came to the U.S. as a boy of 14 to live with his sister, who was the
editor's great-grandmother. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard, and
taught at Stanford from 1911 to 1914 as Assistant Professor of Romance
Languages.

When the First World War
broke out, he returned to France and volunteered as an enlisted man in the
5th battalion of the elite chasseurs à pied. He wrote letters
to his family in Brooklyn, to his fiancée, and to friends and colleagues for
two years, until he was killed at the battle of the Somme.

The letters are factual,
filled with dry humour, comments on European and American politics, notes
about wartime prices and social conditions, the military situation,
observations on the French character, and the ribald opinions of his fellow
soldiers.

The letters are
interspersed with selections from his diary, which give his own unglossed,
private version of events, in contrast to the more cheerful letters he sent
home to his young nieces in Brooklyn.

Robert Pellissier realised
within the first few weeks that the war would turn into a bloody stalemate.
He hated the senseless slaughter and the calculated cruelties of the new
style of mechanized war.

At the same time, he
refused to give in to the propaganda caricatures of the Germans. He
distinguished clearly between German militarism, which he despised, and the
main stream of German culture, which he knew thoroughly and admired.

Most of the
English-language books of letters from WWI which are currently available are
written by British or American soldiers. Robert Pellissier's letters
are unique in that they were written in excellent English by a native French
speaker, who had a complete understanding of both French and American
cultures.

They also cover an area of
the front which has not received much attention. He describes in
detail his part in the see-saw battles for Mulhouse in the opening weeks of
the war, and he spent 53 days under siege on the Hartmannweilerskopf, where
the constant bombardment made it impossible for his unit to be relieved.

Not as well-known today as
major battles like Verdun and the Somme, the battle for the
Hartmannweilerskopf was front-page news at the time.

He was wounded and spent
some months in hospital, after which he was judged unfit to carry the heavy
backpack of the ordinary soldier. After a short spell of
liaison/translation work, he was sent to St.-Maixent for officer training.
The competition there was very keen, and most of his fellow candidates were
much younger, so he was passed out of St.-Maixent as a sergeant.

He returned to the Vosges
and spent several months up near Munster/Colmar, before being drafted up to
the Somme, where he was killed. His final letters were written only
hours before his death.

This new edition of the
letters includes footnotes for all of the many contemporary references and
translations of the hundreds of French phrases and literary allusions which
are salted throughout the original manuscript. It also includes a time
line, an index of place names, letters which were sent home by the military
chaplain after Pellissier's death, and eulogies written by his colleagues
and his sister, plus maps and photographs of him both in uniform and in
civilian clothes.

The editor of the letters,
Joshua Brown, lives and works in Richmond, Indiana.

A Good Idea of Hell: Letters from a
Chasseur à Pied
Edited by Joshua Brown
Foreword by Leonard Smith, professor of history at Oberlin College
(2003: Texas A&M University Press)
ISBN 1-58544-210-0
$39.95; also available
on-line at Amazon.com

Sponsored Links

Saturday, 22 August, 2009Joshua Brown

By 1918 the percentage of women to men working in Britain had risen to 37% from 24% at the start of the war.